What you don't know can't hurt you...

I sometimes read scripts for other writers whom I know and who have asked me for feedback. Generally speaking, this doesn’t make me popular as I always indicate beforehand that I will be as honest as I can be and then piss people off for being as honest as I can be.

Sometimes the scripts are very good (stand up please, AMERICAN WOMAN by Artemis Penny & Brett A. Snodgrass) and normally they are just okay but have a problem with structure, character or dialogue.


Most, however, are pretty poor and if I am to assume that they’ve been sent to me because the writer thinks them to be in a presentable condition then I’m pleased not to have been sent them earlier in the process.


I got sent two scripts last week and whilst one was average, the other was terrible. (If you are one of the two people who sent me a script to read last week, rest assured that yours was the average one and the other guy was responsible for the terrible one.) It was so bad – so utterly, unremittingly appalling – that it first sent me into a depression and then encouraged me to dump my intended column which was supposed to be about naked supermodels and opine about the problems that can turn a hundred and ten blank pages into a hundred and ten pages that should have stayed blank.

So, the idea wasn’t awful, but neither was it exciting, extraordinary or different – I can’t tell you what it was, because it wouldn’t be fair – but the script was flawed. There was a lot wrong with it; the characters were thin, the dialogue was weak and neither cadence nor tone differentiated one speaker from the next. The story was flat, the structure was fractured and the theme was unclear. It was so bad I read it three times, even though I had a headache after the first twenty pages or so. I rang the writer and had a chat with him about it, because I thought the list of weaknesses I would have to compile would cause them to jump off a cliff and a chat was a kinder option. He told me that the fault was that he ‘didn’t really believe in the story’ which had coloured his writing and I didn’t really believe him so he sent me another script and it was so much better that it could have been written by a whole other person – it was as right as the other had been wrong.

The problem seemed to be that his agent – some no-mark from an agency which had never previously broken through my consciousness – had read the first script, the good one, and told him that a story about two cowboy brothers fighting on opposite sides in the American Civil War wasn’t a good idea and that he should ‘go away and write about something he knows’.


What does this mean? (Rhetorical, obviously – I know what it means; I just don’t know why it has been said.) Look, writers are almost uniformly dullards – they have problems interacting with others, they have chosen a life of solitude and loneliness in which they are fully aware they will be treated badly and get laid less often, and by less attractive women, than producers or actors. They can generally only properly express themselves on the page and if they were adventurers, they would be out there doing it rather than shut up in a little room writing about it. So, why tell someone like that to ‘write what they know’? Obviously, they aren’t going to know anything of much use, other than where the best porn can be found on the internet, how to get through level three of Grand Theft Auto and where the nearest Starbucks with free Wi-Fi can be found. Telling someone like this to ‘write what they know’ is akin to asking North Korean leader Kim Jong-il what he thinks is the best Britney Spears song. They don’t know anything, because if they did they wouldn’t be a screenwriter.

The point about film is that it allows an audience to experience wonderful stories about fantastic situations which they would never experience in life and it seems strange that the creators of such things must somehow be expected to limit their stories to situations and events that they have had experience of. I asked the writer to check with the agent – did they, perhaps, mean ‘base their characters upon PEOPLE they knew’? He checked and confirmed back – ‘write what you know means write what you know’. He was told to ‘ground his script in reality’.

My advice – which is as suspect as anyone else’s, of course – is not to do this, because it is an incalculably stupid suggestion. Further, in fact, than just ignoring the instructions of this halfwit, my advice is to do the opposite. Let your imagination soar and write extraordinary, fantastic, astonishing stories about things which you – and by extension, almost certainly your audience – would not normally experience. Take them to a place where they have never before been and show them things they will never, ever see. Hurdle all boundaries and let your imagination fly. Write not what you know but what you want to show, and if you need to understand mechanics, logistics and details then turn off the porn – just for a moment - and look up the background to your brave new world.

And then - only then - send it to me to ask what I think...